Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Existing enterprise business applications such as SAP® Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are typically based on a data model which was designed, implemented, evolved over a long period of time; a period a few years is not uncommon. The data model is typically implemented in a proprietary way and can only be accessed and consumed via a suitable application server (e.g., SAP® ABAP application server). Data models are crucial for the running business applications, and thus must be carefully maintained in order to guarantee stability of the enterprise's existing business processes.
With the introduction of in-memory database systems (e.g., the SAP HANA® database product), direct access to the business data and the implementation of application logic in the database layer becomes possible. Business data can be accessed using standard means like sequential query language (SQL) or multi-dimensional expressions (MDX), especially for analytical purposes. In order to make the data available, a new data model layer needs to be created on top of the pre-existing data model so that desired analytics can be performed on the underlying business data.